Opening School's Trails To Public

New Sign And Route Map To Welcome Visitors

January 03, 2001|By INDRANEEL SUR; Courant Staff Writer

STAFFORD — For nearly eight years, Judith Sullivan's second-grade students have come face to face with butterfly bushes, tree swallows and even deer along a trail behind West Stafford Elementary School.With the installation of a new welcome sign and trail map expected this spring, volunteers hope to invite Stafford neighbors for their own inspiring walks through the brush and trees behind the school. The public properties there join Shenipsit State Forest.

Parents of West Stafford students helped clear a trail in the early 1990s that loops around wooded parts of school-owned property behind the building, Sullivan said.

Then, after asking state experts to evaluate parts of the town's 36 acres near the school in 1997, members of Stafford's conservation commission decided to extend Sullivan's trail and add several new ones. Volunteers made the trails by clearing shrub and fallen limbs, but didn't have to cut down any trees for them, said the commission's Gloria Krol.

``We have stewardship over the acreage,'' Krol said. ``We'll see how much we can accomplish'' in drawing attention to the trails, she added.

A large, color-coded display of the trails in this West Stafford conservation area should be up in time for spring and summer hikes. The commission member building the sign, Calvin Innes, said that the trails could be a place to host Earth Day or Arbor Day tours and events in April.

Volunteers cleared one linear trail that begins near the school and runs into the area around the Diamond Ledge rock shelter. Native Americans may have sought overnight refuge there as they mined the nearby quarry for quartz to use in arrow heads, an archaeologist told the conservation commission. Foliage along the trail will screen the shelter from view in the summer, Krol said.

Innes said that while commission members want to encourage visitors to use the trails, people taking quartz chunks from the nearby quarry for commercial sale or their private collections have left parts of the ground there unstable.

In patches, the collectors ``have left the area rather precipitous and dangerous, by my estimation,'' said Innes, who is employed as a state forest supervisor in Barkhamsted.

The trail itself gives a wide berth to the quarry and avoids any crumbling parts, Krol said. Trees along the trails will be painted with small patches to mark the paths for visitors.